What game mechanics do you enjoy or that surprised you when playing a game? I recently started playing Tunic and I love building out the “manual” for the game and getting hints on how to play.

  • A really well done survival-craft gameplay loop is sooo addicting. When they get the balance just right it’s so satisfying, but when it’s off a little bit it can be so frustrating. For example I thought Subnautica had a really great balance of resource gathering and building and exploring. On the other hand, something like Raft has the balance way off and it’s really not fun for me at all.

    • Same. I really liked the early alphas of 7 days to die but then they went and tried to make it much harder and it just stopped being fun. I haven’t played it recently so maybe they’ve backed off but early on I put in so many hours. Building was great and the zombies did just the right amount of damage to buildings.

      • Same. I suspect what happened is that they did the mistake of catering to their hardest core of players. People who make impenetrable minmaxed defenses that exploit every mechanic in the game engine, suddenly find that the game is “too easy”, so they adjust the game to make it challenging for them.

        Thus leaving the rest of us with a game where dogs chew through concrete.

    • Subnautica was the first survival-crafting game I played and I became obsessed in large party because of how finally tuned crafting and progression was. Now I keep trying a bunch of other similar games hoping they grip me like Subnautica, but they never come close. No Man’s Sky was closest but it’s too big and unfocused. I went from repairing my little broken ship to owning an entire freighter in like 2 hours.

      Much like how I keep buying racing games hoping something will click like the old burnout games, I’m coming to realize I don’t think I like the genre that much, I just liked that one special entry within it.

        • I actually have heard that before and have wanted to try! Unfortunately I’ve only had playstation consoles with the exception of the 360. I was actually planning on eventually getting a series x or s to play their exclusive stuff (particularly from Arkane), but if things keep turning out like Redfall I may reconsider.